


Portrait-Sonnets of Artemis

by Sensorielle_Envie



Category: Original Work
Genre: Experimental Style, F/F, Food Porn, Lovecraftian, Musings on Identity, POV Multiple, Surreal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 19:45:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 6,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18395120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sensorielle_Envie/pseuds/Sensorielle_Envie
Summary: The tale of a doll who cannot feel, and so spends her day at a grocery store to buy a chocolate cake; the tale of a youth who no longer feels the caress of time; the tale of an actress who ascends from hellish depths. A triptych (if anything) retold in the present tense, as if amnesia were settling in.





	1. I

Do crabs feel pain?

Really.

It moves through the aquarium, blue on yellow, coral elegance, a pincer dance. But under that carapace, sparkling xanthous yellow, does the central nervous system of a crab know pain? Does a shell crack play off its lyre nerves? Is a mallet a symphony of malice?

I wonder sometimes.

We feed him octopus and dead birds. Seems happy.

I don’t feel pain.

Well, all I know is that the balcony is wintry this May, and the neon lights of Asphodel’s upper echelon are waving turquoise blue and my favorite orca violet.

Sorry.

Orchid, I mean to say.

Sometimes I ruin my words, which I think is a fault of my forgetfulness. When I was born, I faced a wall of shadows, watching animals made of darkness wave ahead. And when I found my way out, into the menagerie sprawl, at first I couldn’t endure the light. But now, looking onto these colors, I would never to my return desire.

Although I think about it.

Everyone has a part of them that wants to be bound once more. Homesick to the same ebon diamonds, the sound of white panthers.

I love cigarettes.

Something about this menthol warmth… it soothes me. A lullaby made of candlefire and ash. I try not to smoke too many, which is why I’m over the balcony now, flicking the cinder away. Forever now ashes dance into fire escapes across the street, blown by iceberg breezes from atop the sphere.

What you can see from up here is wonderful. Forgive me, I’ve trouble selecting a more enthusiastic word. But I see so much of the world below. The underworld. Netherworld of demons, devil charms, exorcism and candy. Sorry. Not really. But there are people down there on the sidewalks amidst an airy pageantry. I wonder how many will die tonight, having never thought about it?

Flick.

Not to sound macabre, but certainly some of them will die having thought of it before. Which is strange, come to think of it. What a silly psalm to preach and proselytize: ‘Death is inevitable’. And here the suicides are masters. If only there were a place to get it over with, a lethal chamber overseen by some governance made available to the public. It would, I think, lessen our anxieties, should we see across the street a place to easily decapitate our own destiny. Especially after a traumatic experience. One would imagine a horrorscape beyond what they’ve survived, but at the very least I don’t want to end my life. Or said another way: If my life is to end, I am comforted enough that I don’t want to end it myself.

More people should think this way.

Should I start killing people?

Altogether I don’t believe it would make the populace happier. How paranoia devours people of murder, and the corpses I carve out of human parts would cast upon my habit a haunted ground. Well, in spite of my pain…

No.

In spite of the _absence_ of my pain, there are still things I am afraid of. For instance, I myself have died before. Only once, though shall it suffice till the cosmos expire. But I fear ghosts. And to speak so much on cosmology, a place becomes colder in the presence of a ghost. Wouldn’t that be something if all the spirits of dead things float up to space? Our sun is dying faster and faster.

No, I’ve decided. I won’t kill anyone.

Lest I breathe on their cadavers a menthol cloud of smoke, I see it freeze before me.

Other animals? Cats. I’ve killed a dozen cats before. Taken right to the balcony where they fly seven stories. To be honest, only the first one scared me. Little sphinx was a stray in the alley behind our apartment. I remember him, shivering fright of a thing soaked in rain. So I took a box out of the dumpster and gave him shelter. After a trip to the store I bought some hot cocoa and a sausage, but when I came back the cat was lying on the pavement, bones respirating slowly and weak. You could see his measly diet, nearly a skeleton! I ate my things, watching him sulk in front of me and then, feeling sad, ran back to the store for cat food and another hot cocoa. Into the box I poured it.

Should I tell you how nice it is, to comfort a defenseless animal with a cup of hot cocoa?

Oh, but then I tried to pet him.

I didn’t recoil since I cannot feel, but I was closer to dying than I was before the scratch. Nonetheless, too tranquil a scene for hostility. I forgave the offense, necessarily because it’s an animal of hunger. After his meal I attempted to pet the poor sphinx again.

The second time, another scratch.

My blood.

Tremendously difficult, it is, to estimate in detail how loud the fatal crack of a feline skull under a stomp can be. I never splattered something’s miserable brains so hard. The thing’s cranium was a burst open spider web of scarlet gore. Witness then the spasms about so mutilated a specimen, but alive for all my tantrum stomps.  So, since I failed to kill this horrible pest, I brought it up to my bedroom and laid it gently beside my crab.

On the island.

My aquarium.

Didn’t I mention? My crab’s name is Shakespeare.

A golden ghost crustacean.

Anyway, having bled all over the tank, I lifted it by the tail and conducted a musical descent from the balcony, where sanguine fluid fluoresces in rainy weather still. To this day I kill cats. Sometimes I cut holes in their bellies, put my fingers in, and snap them apart.

Orange slices.

Alas, here melancholy triumphs.

My last cigarette burned away.


	2. II

T’wonder why the stars tickle me in upward glance,

then lance eleven sparkles’ luminous swarm to sight.

 

And able all I am to do

in interstellar operatic velvety tutu

 

is dance.

 

_Cygnus, arpeggiating bells._

 

Mother Galaxy isn't herself.

Across the starry vault, glittery star deaths

and blue tidal novas haunt her universe’s lungs.

Within her ribs the stars blossom, pink magenta smears

of decay.

 

“Listen to the lights,” Adeline to Flora.

“Leave Hell to its remnants and hear me, my voice, amidst her echoes.”

 

Her eyes on this horizon, aurora lights above;

peahen twinkle pageantry and lots and lots of Jupiter doves.

But even earlier, scarlet Mars appears in her western palm…

fearsome stanzas his nightly psalm.

 

“Can I tell you a secret?” asks Adeline the flower.

So it is: "O heather mine flora! (Fleur parmi les fleurs!)

You gallop where fairy mares retire and tether

to me.

To me, Aquarius love—

reborn to limb and in my spine as honey.

Red its pearls entwine, we women lattice.

Let us femme lips enlace.

Let us marry under icy Iris’ violet apparatus

and of another’s bliss remind."

 

But these words were dreams, so instead Adeline says,

“I like you” to another girl.

“I like you too.”

And there lie lotus-eaters where the night lapses

and all things are stardust.


	3. III

Coffee? 

I love coffee. 

And for how much of it I have, it needs an artistic chevalier to remove its essence. There are too many coffees, brews that let themselves die to too many thirsts. 

A nursery has milk.

A nurse has her cream.

A tea has scoops of sugar.

See, and how remarkable it is that coffee lies athirst for all these and more!

And what of me, a silent valkyrie, hmm? Humans die all the time; where is my stamina to escort the dead without coffee? My fever ‘tis a duty sworn—a psychopomp.

Oh, but I’m beginning to see the lock of sleep betwixt my blinks. Where hibernate my lattes, caffè mochas, and macchiatos? I cannot ever go to that place again. That palace of dreams beyond elusive things. Keep me from there! Drown me in darkest roasts!

I run away from dreams. 

A corpse carrier am I…


	4. IV

Lady of our Sorrows, you’ve come home! 

Sun it rises! 

Death universe utopia! 

As if it were any other. 

Still, my afantasia comes up with chameleons from time to time. 

My radiance yet rests upon her marvelous caramel bosom.

“Andromeda? Are you awake?”

“Cécile,” I say with my green eye. “Dream in our twilight phantom.”

“But moonlight maiden fair, how didst mine replica writhe alone when labors have me?”

“That isn’t a line from Shakespeare.”

“Oh… Isn’t it?”

“No,” I shake my head.

“How can you tell?”

“The word ‘replica’ forms a dactyl, Cécile.”

“Is that so? And what is known to you about dactyls?”

“In prosody,” I recite, “a dactyl is a metrical foot. One stressed syllable, called an anxiety syllable, and two unstressed syllables, known as meridian golden chocolate syllables.”

She folds her arms around me, slowly onto snow sheets we abseil.

So lascivious for the restless dusk. 

“A dactyl is a hybrid spirit. And Shakespeare never writes in dactyls.”

“Never?” Her lips curiously mimic the shape of mine. 

“No,” I say. “It’s an idea he didn’t often use.”

“Ah, so the courage to not use an idea…”

Now I see—the drapery of her black locks.

Iris—red-violet apples that see me.

“My doll,” she whispers. “My sunburned harvester of August weary, come hither.”

Soon our vessels welcome an aquiline rush of shower steam.

Sorry. 

Aquatic, I mean to say.

She takes me to the shower,

turns it on,

and in mist we remind ourselves of soap. 

Her rainbows of stained glass illuminate in roaring mist. The fragrance of her hair is something I’ll never tell anyone else. Just a secret for me, only me, within my melodious cardiac cellar. And while she’s there, waiting for my hands to glaze it cleanly, I see blood evaporate and whither in her palm.

“Cécile?” I say, lacing foam lather throughout her hair. “What wounded you?”

Glint of ruby scarlet.

A tempest.


	5. V

O somber mahogany,

abandon the way so in twilight I may walk this way.

Moonlit sea green master over me,

hold all that I am or will ever be.

 

Adeline sits in her bedroom abyss alone in the dark.

When she was younger she feared it.

Lightlessness, that is.

And as it happens, there graces the most malevolent glooms a night light in the shape of a scallop shell.

Blue… in a way she remembers.

But the nostalgia, so sharp are you in the vespers of summertime?

She’s writing things right now in a diary. Things like ‘Dear Diary’, etc.

Nights like this kept her awake.

“Hey. Are you still there?”

The sharp gel of her 0.5 mm pen glides between the whimsical slopes of her journal’s lines. It’s a leftover from art class in third year, but Adeline likes it anyway. She once used it to sketch a giant skull whose eye sockets flowed into a blooming rose, and for the outlines of a river nymph.

“Yeah,” Adeline says into the phone. “I’m trying to come up with a story.”

“Oooooh! What about?”

“Well…”

She hasn’t yet decided.

As a little girl, Adeline would write her own comics.

Somewhere in a closet box, those old villains are up to no good.

And every fantasy that played from an album in her mind had a happy ending.

Not a perfect ending; those are two very dissimilar things.

But Adeline’s heroes were happy. Heroes deserve to be happy.

“What about… a league of justice?” Adeline says. “And they’ve all got masks that give them superpowers.”

“Sounds like an anime.”

“And they meet evil angels from another dimension, and the heroes get their wings and banish them to the Abyss of Nebulas. It’s the white edge of space where dreams come from. Happily ever after in Heaven. But one day, a nightmare starts to stretch the universe back to the beginning, and… it’s all I have.”

Flora snickers on the line. “I’ve definitely seen this with some subtitles.”

“It’s not that bad is it?”

“No no! Not bad at all. It’s just the concept is very creative. It’s very _you_ , you know?”

“If you say so. I’m not very… ” Adeline looks to the clock on her dresser, then at the cursive mess in her notebook. “At any rate, none of the characters exist yet, and I’ve only written down a couple sentences.”

 _Golddust_ , Adeline sighs.

The silence thereafter is golden.

It’s her friend’s black lipstick.

Millipede mascara.

Moonlit smile.

A dreamscape made of gothic flora,

nefarious flora,

and ocean-grown black diamonds.

“I’ve got some ideas,” Flora says.

“Really?”

“Sure. Stories are a piece of cake.”

The leader, Flora tells her, is a girl who can send her phantom into the dreams of other angels. That’s where they have an epic fight, in heavenly sleep, and she rips the angel’s wings off.

“That’s pretty cool,” Adeline nods, writing it all down.

“Pretty cool? That’s metal as fuck. And you have to write all the little details too, like the muscles tearing, blood spray, screams. The screams!”

A brave heroine soaring through the stars, and into the rotten mind of…

Wait, this isn’t right.

“Does it have to be so bloody?” she asks. “I’ve never written that stuff before.”

“Not really. But that’d be a fucking sick way to earn some wings. Imagine going to the cinema and seeing that.”

Adeline puts her things down and just lies there in the quiet.

If only she could dream away her phantom, across the city.

A ghost of something, warmer than the slug pits, that drifts wherever it may.

Without wings.

 

And so those hematite waves rattle

into lilacberry lavender champagne.

They live an onyx loll on silver Selene’s moonlit melody of a lake.

 

“Flora?”

“Yeah?”

“Why haven’t we gone to the cinema together?”

“Because,” she sweetly sings, “you’re too afraid to ask me on a date.”

“Why don’t you ask me on a date? I’m shy, you know?”

“I want you to overcome your fears.”

Oh.

Swimming through space, finding only errant minerals and icy rings.

Then, eclipsed in red, the moons of Mars—Phobos and Deimos.

Underneath no wings will ever grow.

So they must be ripped from evil flesh, and that is how things rise to glory.

“Flora, would you… like to go to the cinema with me, tomorrow night?”

“Sure. What time?”

“Uh…”

“Hmm? What time is ‘uh’? I don’t know when that is, space cowboy.”

“I don’t really know! Sorry. I just wanna go. With you. So, so…”

Silence. All of a sudden her pen, once professionally cold and stylistically light, now quivers, wrestled in still fingers by fingerprint splotches of sweat, where is her voice, and she hopes her bursting exhale doesn’t tap the speaker, nor after the whistling inhale through nostrils tuned as in the classical ring of Saturn.

“So? Say it.”

“What should I say?”

“Close your eyes, and say we have a date.”

Adeline swallows a couple heartbeats. “I’ve never had a date.”

“Come on, Adeline. Say it like you’ve never had a… a girlfriend.”

“But I’ve never had a girlfriend.”

“Me neither,” Flora says. The sticks obey a slow tempo.

A pedal kick to bass drum. “Do you want to?”

The brass line up to the conductor’s hand. “Do I want to, Adeline?”

The black audience is watching, made of cursive mess. “I’m sorry.”

Limelights incinerate what keeps anxiety still; the spotlight squeezes out sweat like lemons.

“What are you sorry for?”

“I’m nervous.”

“I’m a little nervous too.”

The reeds, they pilot silver keys; what clarinets have written rusalkas read and sing O maidens of water deep the briars.

“Say it nervously. Say it like… like we’re on a Ferris wheel. Right? We’re on a Ferris wheel and… it’s just us, high above the earth. Clear night. No one else but the torchlit lotteries and the moon. Boom! Fireworks go off. We’re both breathing in that summer air, knowing for this moment we’re both captivated by colorific bursts, one after the other, half alive in smoke, the other half in the deep jetty of distant stars. And down below are the shadows of what we worry about. They can’t reach us all the way up here. It’s just us, you know? And fireflies… Say it like that. Please.”

And it’s an hour after midnight on a Friday.

And they don’t attend the same school.

And summer break began a week ago.

And both of them suddenly have all these ideas.

Ideas about stories.

Ideas about music.

Dreams about the night itself, where horror stays its place.

And Adeline says, “We have a date.”


	6. VI

The waitress comes to us.

Key lime pie slices on lilypad saucers. Cream chunks in triangle shapes, crowned with a dollop of whipped cream. A garnish of curled lime, and little citrus populations. The crust in which it’s nestled is a pleasant flake; see it crack apart and lay delicious green on her fork.

Before that succulence, for only a moment, it is cold.

And it comes to us.

Green eyes.

“Ooou! How romantic!”

Pyrrha wolfs it down, little philosophizing what it is.

But what else could it be? It’s key lime pie.

“Did you know?” she says to me. “There’s a name for the color of my hair.”

“Is it blue?” I guess.

“Of course it’s blue, silly! But there’s a butterfly where the coldblood rivers flow called a mazarine blue. On top, yes, it is a pearlescent sparkly blue. However, across its wings underneath is a flat grey-white lustre speckled with black stars. Like the choral Hyades. If you were an insect looking up at it, you would see a moth. From above a butterfly.”

Another coffee sip of sugary dark. “It’s… a perfect blue, then?”

“Oh Mirah! You really think so?”

In all avenues corpses rot, until the vertebras no longer hide that they are waning. Eclipsed by bloodstorms are organ trails and innard ravings. Torture and a fiendish gentry scream aloud and reapers by scalding red lakes call in hurdy-gurdy sonnets. A fearsome place, where there is no sun that isn’t dead or in atmosphere. Throats are sanded sore from laments. The wayward limp with gore hanging off them.

I am a valkyrie in a play about Hell.

_Who am I? Who am I? Who am I…_

MY hands shake when I don’t have coffee…

Rehearsal nights, my rifles…

I remember the stage all an amaranthine graze and whence I fell…

What falls and is becoming…

What falls and is becoming…

Soothing hymn, silverware on plate…

To be just us.

Then, is her hair a perfect blue?

“I would say so.”

“My, what a paramour! Mazarine, mazarine!”

So, it makes her happy when I say that.

Couleur de l’infini; bound, and boundless.

What is that finale, when the sun goes out and says it was really this way all along? When sister galaxies inhale the steam of our sizzled rock? Death will not keep them from stirring, nor will it come for them like a subtle cream arisen to the level. Nor I, though I serve its carrier the soul. But we are haunted by a vast hollow future, and suspecting we cannot alter the course, we see prints on the beach where we haven’t stepped and hope we fill a shape foreseen by the ancestor. And many will follow those invisible steps as they are aimless. And we may be anchored in the sea, but do not let bad faith take you there in a dream. Yes, even the stories of a dream are not your poetry.

There’s a particular _ring_ when a spoon taps the edge.

More sugar, I guess.

“Well?”

She catches me mid-sip. “Well what?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me about myself?”

Pyrrha lays herself in her hands, her eyelids falling like hourglass granules. Waiting, like sand. Her eyes drill into me the silence of an electric tool. And they shine this midnight cacao color.

I set the cup down. “How did you die?” I ask.

She smiles a little, her eyes rolling to remember. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you that.”

“Oh? Now I’m curious.”

“It’s just…” Pyrrha cradles her face. “It’s embarrassing.”

Don’t you think the Persephone finds it embarrassing that we keep up the struggle when we can’t possibly survive it all? But then, a longer life makes more mistakes—what is Hell but a testament to that? Still, the best stories are about the people whose lives lasted however long they needed to.

Or perhaps the stories ended when they needed to.

Maybe the rest was too embarrassing.

“I was at a birthday party,” she begins. “I was dressed in pretty makeup. Just like this! And my face was a powdered sugar donut. And I wore a gown of rainbows, with jingle bells on my sleeves.”

“The same gown you’re wearing now?” I ask.

“Yes! And the same red nose too! How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

“So there I was, with dainty dandelion blue hair—oh, but aren’t dandelions yellow?”

“Not all the time,” I say.

“Well, it was cloudy. That kind of cloudy day where it’s sunshine sunny warm one moment, and the next it’s a colorless stone tone. Somewhere down the street someone ran a lawnmower, and the fragrant grass found itself bending in soft April wind. Found itself falling asleep.

“I made balloon animals for the kids, and for the birthday boy an inflatable lion! I juggled, I played with puppets, I did magic tricks. It was an extravaganza! Of course, some of the children didn’t like me very much. Clowns are often scary, you know? But it smelled like charcoal and grilled hotdogs. And when the mom came out with this big chocolate cake and vanilla ice-cream, all the children ran to the picnic table! And the birthday boy decided to sit next to me.

“His name was Matias and he said I was the prettiest girl he ever saw. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked me. I looked up to the blue sky, who in turn looked upon us, and I think he knew. It’s a beautiful place, I told him. ‘Is that where you learned your magic?’ And I said yes it is. The cake was pink. So soft, so very soft.

“The son had an older sister named Penelope. Inside the house, though none of us heard it, she called out a name. The television loudly roared about a once in a lifetime offer. She called out again and began checking every room. Outside, her mother sat with us observing her wedding band after a large bite of pure sugar icing. Was it always so small? Her son scooped a chunk of cake and stabbed it through a vanilla scoop on his soggy paper plate. The color from it had started running, and he asked me ‘How many birthdays do I have left?’ I smiled. Penelope’s heartbeat raced her breathing and lost, until she came into the kitchen and saw the basement door open slightly. No one had gone in the basement. Not since the lights stopped working. When the beam of her flashlight lit up the wooden stairs, she heard a faint shuffle in the darkness. The wood warped in prior centuries, every plank a hook and slant. Butterflies the color of my hair parlayed with pollen from a garden hibiscus, spelling names in the air I couldn’t quite say. ‘Is there anything else out there?’ the birthday boy asked; I spoke so much my ice-cream had melted. The mother tugged her silvery ring but it wouldn’t move. She left her fork alone before tossing her half-eaten cake into a trash bag. Back in the basement Penelope looked around, her light beam a needle in black fabric. The airborne dust made it hard to breathe, and she couldn’t hear the shuffling from before. It was then someone else went down the old basement stairs. ‘Hello?’ Penelope cried out. Above us those ashen clouds returned, and I could feel the presence of someone who shouldn’t be there. Did you know, I told Matias, that cicadas are the sound the sun makes? That is, until you see one. ‘I’m afraid of cicadas,’ he said. And I told him that cicadas are the summertime and sing to you.”


	7. VII

Fuzziness of memory.

As I have said before, I am a doll. Or have I never said this?

“This?” 

Cécile opens it, like me discovering a rose bloom in an oversea meadow.

A gash in the right hand.

I don’t know why, but I’m prepared for her to lie to me. 

I shouldn’t expect it, especially because she loves me and has made me. 

No husk am I she sustains, or a body. 

Well, all I am is a body. 

Very much a body. 

Maybe nothing if not flesh jiggly on bone. 

But she will lie to me, I think, so in the shower I will stay my silence, washing her and sulking in her beauty.

Sorry.

I meant soaking.

When I think about it, though we are so deeply in love, I would rather Cécile lie to me than any other, since even though I am almost all my mind, offense rarely comes to me, if at all. 

Who cares about a lie from one you love? 

More than a tool, why would they lie? 

Only, I believe, to protect what is dearly held. 

Oh, is that intention alone? 

Yes, I think so too. 

We strive, or well, we should strive, to keep our deceits from becoming corporeal. 

Give it no body, and if it has one, whither its husk with time and watch it.

Fuzziness of memory, I can’t recall?

The will to have is greater than the act of siring one’s own kin? 

Dreams of a mansion overcome what keeps you in a poor house, is that it? 

This isn’t very sincere. 

Surely something good can come out of dreaming, and if it were one’s intent to protect someone by lying to them, it only averts their eyes, averts their will; a lie deletes no truth, and no matter how wide open are the scientist eyes, truth can still be stumbled into blindly.

I tell myself this.

Wanting to protect someone does not make a haven, or make them safe.

Not even a lie.

I would rather her lie to me than anyone else.

If she lied to me, I would probably forgive her.

But if she lied to me, no one would pity her more.

Such a disappointment.

If she were to do so.

“It’s nothing,” Cécile says.

“Really?”

“I said so, my doll. Why would I lie to you? You live in another galaxy sometimes, Andromeda, and the truth is different there. You know?”

I see. That’s her response.

Maybe she wants me to forget about it, and I may do just that. 

Some phenomenon, my memory is. 

She brought it up a month ago. I have terrible memory.

Why wouldn’t I see a therapist? Well, my inner monologue will say.

People approach therapy the wrong way.

People assume therapy is discovery. Shovel to the root of a rotten pear tree.

But it isn’t.

Therapy is reflection.

A therapist is a broken mirror, until from us they pluck the pieces of ourselves we’ve hidden.

Until we can see clearly again.

A therapist is a messiah like that.

In spite of it, they have to take something for themselves from the patience they counsel.

Sorry. Patients, I meant.

I’ve heard it said that the mind is a pear in a jar. Or the mind is led astray by a lullaby, to believe all its misfortunes the product of ill fortune or fate. 

‘I’m just unlucky’, or ‘I am this way because all things have a reason’.

Lullaby sung by a bird, I have heard it said.

The therapist, I think, puts it to sleep as it’s done us. 

A medicine its own. An arrow its fletching.

They take feathers from it, just a few. For arrows. A therapist also must rely on their selfishness, or else risk becoming jealous of all the most unlucky people. 

Well, a therapist is a broken mirror. And certainly there exist those whose reflections will never return. 

Not vampires, don’t be silly. 

But there are probably people, I think, who cannot find their missing glass. 

Or people who have no missing glass. 

Shrouded by night. 

Are we then to be given glass?

“Then, if it really is nothing…”

I go back to scrubbing her hair. In the bubbles aflutter around us rainbows enlace, myriad aglow in the stained glass. Chalk white bubbles dissolve around her darkly threaded curls, then… float off to other islands. Facets of steam…

Sorry. Faucets of steam…

I really feel like, in that fog, I can imagine something clearly without the dumb rhythm of my breathing. A calm to be waded through, a sort of marshland or meadow psalm. But my skin comes out pink in the shower, and my nose is red. Why should I be scolded when the water does this too?

By the way, last winter I had a hot shower; the windows were open and from the street Cécile thought the room was on fire. I’ve apologized a lot for that.

If we could rinse away that memory…

Here I am again, thinking of memory.

“Andromeda,” she says. “The cut doesn’t bother me.”

Some citrus body gel I squeeze onto a sponge. The lather makes her shoulders hurricane ‘round, her little pauldrons made of pink. What’s under there, my sweet? If I cut open her shoulders, will I see what pomegranate arils you’re made of? So sweet, so very sweet.

“What’s your favorite color?” Cécile asks of me.

I tell her it’s not something I ever think about, peering at the discolored red waterfall connecting our feet. “Maybe the color of flames. Or magenta.”

“Ah, so you never think about it?”

From her palm Ares’ festival is falling out.


	8. VIII

I am

cream dumped into

cups dissolved in

tea-caramel stuff. I am a 

skeleton in the sketches of a muse.

 

Be there a 

doctor? I am 

dying on a

bridge east of a view.

I am a

tablet taken for carcinogens.

 

Coldwind isolates the waiting room. 

Far from home.

Bell sounds to an early sun.

And xylophones retreat to flesh canoes.

At the very least, the fish tank in the center is lovely. There’s a behemoth silver goldfish with splotches of scaly orange, obscured by the wavy plants. Aimless but golden citrus hues that dart wherever they want. They have some spots of black, spots of pancake batter white; freshwater angels swim with no concern, totally embraced by liberty. Lovingly fed. Firemouth cichlids who’ve made home under Amazon sword leaves nearby spiral. And stupid halfmoon bettas alive in spite of…

Golden orange silver fish. They’re all the same, minus a detail.

It would be difficult to name them and recall which was which.

They swim so relaxed in that aquarium.

Adeline’s nervous. It’s redundant to say. 

She’s doing that thing where she can’t stop moving her thumbs. 

Butterflies breed in stomach hollows. 

All alone.

In the fiery autumn trees of yesterday, Adeline climbs them swiftly and lets her hair be chameleon to the auburn bark. What would Flora say?

_“You don’t have to be nervous.”_

Something like that.

 

So the clock hand haunts her, 

its ticking taunt assaults her, 

all other sounds rescind and sieve away. 

 

“Hey,” with which Phoenix breaks the silence. “After this, you wanna go to Franciszka’s?”

Adeline blinks. “What’s Franciszka’s?”

“It’s a bar down the street. They have wings.”

“I don’t know.” The clock says 11 a.m.

“You can get whatever you want. They have spicy chicken sandwiches and fries. Cold soda. Your dad and I used to go there all the time.”

“No, I mean I don’t know if… I want to go there.”

“Well,” her mother getting a mint candy in her purse, “I don’t wanna be here forever. It’s freezing!” she says. “And there’s no beer.”

“Mom!”

A poster on the wall displays the human digestive system. Did you know? The body can eat against the ubiquitous pull of gravity. It’s a process called peristalsis, whereby muscles in the throat move in waves to take food to your stomach. The lower esophageal sphincter is a muscular band at the end of every swallow that acts as a valve; to let food in; to keep your stomach juices from traveling upwards. 

“Please, honey,” Phoenix snickers. “All toffee-nosed and whatnot. You stole one of my piña coladas once.”

“I don’t remember that!”

“It was one of your birthdays. You wanted a sip. And of course I said why the hell not, I clearly had a couple. So you took the curly straw to your little hands and inhaled half my cocktail glass. I was speechless.”

“Were we in Texas?” Adeline asks.

“Ah, so you do remember.”

“I never said that.”

“No? We rented a cabin by the Medina River. Your dad wasn’t too happy I let you do that.”

But the epiglottis covers the windpipe at every swallow, like a piccolo note. This is an involuntary process.  

“What’s in a piña colada anyway?”

“Depends on how you make it.”

“How did you make the one in Texas?”

“White rum, puréed pineapple, cream of coconut, coconut milk, and lime juice. Garnished with a cherry.”

“This sounds like a lot of work.”

“Sort of. You need a wide glass. Or a willingness to share.”

“And rum. What’s that taste like?”

“Rum is sweet,” her mother nods. “Like toasted sugar. But sometimes rum is spicy, or dark, or woody.”

The average person can hold their breath on command for about thirty seconds. Absent of its ample oxygen, the brain will fall unconscious from hypoxia. And then it will breath again, if it can. 

The minutes move quietly, all sixty ghosts of this clinic adjourned at noon. Telephone wires together thread the sidewalks as reeds do for the creek belly meadows. Adeline doesn’t know any dark or woodland spirits, yet in picturing them her thoughts taste her mind. And what about toasted sugar? Such descriptors likely Bacchus’ shape reminds.

After an hour, in such a span no doctors ask her height or eyesight, or leave the very name of Adeline to herself, for no others have come into the office in an hour too, and ill of its beerless icy trance, Phoenix and her daughter depart. “We’ll simply have to reschedule,” she says opening the door. “A shame they’re so suddenly understaffed.” In the parking lot are cars aplenty.

Franciszka’s on the other hand hosts an empty lot. The concrete lot and the sky are the same grey-white lustre, although for a moment the clouds retire and a blue hum sings on its horizon. It seems the motors of this town have elsewhere to be.

Wait.

There is a car here. 

Phoenix and Adeline park right next to it. 

On the inside it’s a little less colder than the doctor’s office, here too imprisoned by a heavy glass door. No mistakes made, Franciszka’s is very much a bar, with all the cigarette and pale lager scent ascended in cool air. The bar itself is somewhat small, the rest of the hall made up of circular tables and booths. But in Adeline’s seventeen years, she’s never seen so many colorful draughts and decoctions. How can so many drinks taste like ruby red, apple green, or cinnamon bronze?

Politely, her mother taps the bell. 

“!!!”

A lot of boxes topple over. The sound of someone falling, a meteoric skillet _clang!_ as rocks roll to their promontory end. A ‘tiger sprinting through a ventilation shaft’ sort of sound. To be clear, it sounded painful.

“I’m okay!” says a voice. “I was asleep!”

Heavenly wings palm the air about her shoulder blades. She is dressed in a snow cocoon sundress and above her head rests a fairy light diadem, its flits and sparkles radiant. She does her best to smile.

Outside the wind softly rages and courteously carves its curses. 

What a sunny day.

Her name is Teodozja. 

“Sorry.” 

“No, it’s fine. Are you alright?” Adeline’s mother leans in. 

“Yep!” Teodozja yawns when a bloody droplet lands in her eye. 

“Honey, you’re bleeding.”

“Oh! Sorry.” She takes a napkin from a dispenser, or tries to, tips it over, retrieves seven too many, coursly wipes at it, smears her black makeup, soaks the napkin cluster, the colors blur, apologizes for another time, and still remains until blood pools around her chin. And also until it doesn’t. “I had a scary night.”

The two customers look at each other.

Meanwhile, little flames respire within the bottles hot magenta! 

Mallets on wooden slats made of glass, 

an etude, a concerto in A minor. 

Bell sounds to an early sun. 

And xylophones retreat to flesh canoes.

But Adeline only daydreams this.

"Do you believe in God?"


End file.
